Joan Ganz Cooney - Sesame Street and The Children's Television Workshop

Sesame Street and The Children's Television Workshop

In the winter of 1966, Cooney hosted what she called "a little dinner party" at her apartment near Gramercy Park. In attendance was her husband Tim Cooney, her boss Lewis Freedman, and Lloyd and Mary Morrisett, whom the Cooneys knew socially. Lloyd Morrisett was an executive at the Carnegie Corporation, and was responsible for funding educational research. The conversation turned to the possibilities of using television to educate young children; Morrisett raised the question, "Do you think television could be used to teach young children?" Cooney replied, "I don't know, but I'd like to talk about it." According to Davis, the party was the start of a five-decade long professional relationship between Cooney and Morrisett. A week later, Cooney and Freedman met with Morrisett at the offices of the Carnegie Corporation to discuss doing a feasibility study on creating an educational television program for preschoolers. Freedman was opposed to Cooney's involvement because he did not think she would be interested in a project that focused on children and because he did not want to lose her at Channel 13, but she was chosen to do the study.

In the summer of 1967, Cooney took a leave of absence from Channel 13, and funded by the Carnegie Corporation, traveled the U.S. and Canada interviewing experts in child development, education, and television. According to Davis, "The result of Cooney's travels was a distilled, neatly structured fifty-five-page report entitled "The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education". The report, which Gikow called "a schematic for the show Sesame Street would become", described what the new show would look like and proposed the creation of a company that oversaw its production, which eventually became known as the Children's Television Workshop (CTW). Cooney later stated that her undergraduate training in Education helped her research and write the study, and that it, along with her Emmy, provided her with credibility in the eyes of both the experts she interviewed and the new show's funding sources. Davis credited Cooney's motivation to be involved with the project with her journalism skills, learned early in her career, and her idealism, which drove her to want to, as she put it, "make a difference". She later told an interviewer, "I could do a thousand documentaries on poverty and poor people that would be watched by a handful of the convinced, but I was never really going to have an influence on my times". She later told Davis, "Preschoolers were not necessarily my thing. It was using television in a constructive way that turned me on".

At first, Cooney assumed that the project would be produced by Channel Thirteen, but when the station's owner rejected the proposal and questioned Cooney's credentials, she left the station and went to the Carnegie Corporation as a full-time consultant in May 1967. For the next two years, Cooney and Morrisett worked on researching and developing the new show, raising $8 million for Sesame Street, and establishing the CTW. According to Davis, despite her leadership in the project's initial research and development, Cooney's installment as CTW's executive director was put in doubt due to her lack of high-level managerial experience and leadership, untested financial management skills, and lack of experience in children's television and education. Davis also speculated that sexism was involved, stating, "Doubters also questioned whether a woman could gain the full confidence of a quorum of men from the federal government and two elite philanthropies, institutions whose wealth exceeded the gross national product of entire countries". At first, Cooney did not fight for the position, but with the support of her husband and Morrisett, and after the investors of the project realized that they could not move forward without her, Cooney pursued it and was named executive director of CTW in February 1968. As one of the first female executives in American television, her appointment was called "one of the most important television developments of the decade".

Sesame Street premiered on PBS on November 10, 1969. In its first season, the show won three Emmys, a Peabody, and was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. According to Newsday, "Scores of glowing newspaper and magazine stories fluttered down on Mrs. Cooney and her workshop like confetti onto the heads of conquering heroes". Les Brown of Variety Magazine called Cooney "St. Joan". Cooney later reported, "The reception was so incredible. The press adored us; the parents adored us." The first yearSesame Street was on the air, Cooney was, as Davis put it, "inundated with attention". Cooney reported that the requests for interviews from the press "were endless", and attributed it to the emergence of the women's movement in the early 1970s. Cooney also testified before Congressional hearings on children and television, starting before the show's premiere.

In 1969, Tim and Joan Cooney, who were childless, became "de factor foster parents to an inner-city black child" whom Tim Cooney met while working in Harlem for a civil rights organization. Eventually, the child returned to live with his mother and was killed in New York City before he turned 30. The Cooneys' marriage, which Davis called "turbulent", ended in 1975. Due to Tim Cooney's long history of alcoholism, he was unable to support himself, so Joan Cooney paid him alimony until his death in 1999. In August 1975, nine months after separating from her husband, Cooney was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy.